Decomposition of ball in Banach Tarski paradox and covering a soccer ball

92 Views Asked by At
  1. Banach Tarski paradox says that it's possible to decompose a ball in $R^3$ into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can be then reassembled into 2 identical copies of the original ball. Furthermore, 5 subsets is enough. My questions are:

    • How to do this with 5 subsets?
    • Is 5 the smallest number?
  2. As I observe, a soccer ball is covered by regular pentagons and regular hexagons (but they are not flat). My questions are:

    • How to calculate the number of each type?
    • Do these pentagons have the same side? If yes, how long is it? Same questions for hexagons.
    • Why are regular pentagon and hexagon but not other regular polygons?, not other combinations?, not other types of polygons?

In both parts, let's use the unit ball (radius = 1) for simplification.